Obesity facilitates tumor growth in mice redardless of their diet

Epidemiologic studies have strongly associated the incidence of cancer with obesity, but their pathophysiologic connections remain obscure. Researchers at the Institute of Molecular Medicine at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston may have discovered a new explanation as to why obese patients with cancer often have a poorer prognosis compared with those who are lean.

Mikhail G. Kolonin and his colleagues evaluated how adipose stromal cells (ASC), transplanted  into mice, can serve as perivascular adipocyte progenitors that promote tumor growth. Their initial results confirmed this hypothesis: In obese and lean mice that ate the same diet, tumors grew much faster in obese mice than they did in lean mice. They also found that ASC were expanded into the circulation in obesity and that they traffic from endogenous adipose tissue to tumors in several mouse models of cancer.

Once in the tumors, some of these cells developed into fat cells, while others were incorporated into tumor-associated blood vessels, which support tumor growth by bringing in oxygen and nutrients to cancer cells. According to the researchers, this ability of ASC is likely one of the main reasons that the excess of these cells in tumors was associated with increased malignant cell proliferation.


Source: Cancer Research